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We looked for audits by third-party firms, prioritizing those that assessed the overall security of a VPN provider. The minimum: marketing copy consistent with the privacy policy and the terms of service. The best: easy-to-read policies; companies located in countries with strong consumer protections; no third-party trackers on the website.
The VPNs we chose said they logged minimal information. We asked companies about their internal security and privacy standards, and how they would respond to requests for information, in order to gauge the trustworthiness of their statements on logging.
For a VPN service, this can feel somewhat contradictory to the larger promises made in website copy probably written by the same marketing team making use of these trackers. Despite our extensive testing, we know that VPNs work differently in different locations and on different computers and networks. A trial or a free version of a VPN can allow you to test out several of them risk-free to see if any are a better fit for your specific circumstance. In lieu of a free trial or tier, we recommend trying out a new VPN for a month before committing to buying it for a full year.
The more servers a network has at each of its locations, the more likely you are to have a speedy connection. And a VPN with a wide variety of server locations can help you geoshift your location without losing connectivity or allow you to log on to a less-congested part of the world. However, VPNs tend to be slower at peak times even on the most robust networks due to limited bandwidth in and out of an area.
We built our requirements based on interviews with experts and recommendations PDF put out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. We recommend the open-source WireGuard protocol, a new lightweight protocol that is gaining prominence. It now has Windows and macOS support and is integrated into the Linux kernel, which required additional security review.
Although AES bit encryption is fine for most purposes , we prefer services that default to the more-secure bit encryption and still offer good performance. The best: customizable rules allowing you to activate a kill switch on startup or on specific networks. Without a kill switch, if your Wi-Fi drops or another connectivity issue occurs, your VPN stops securing the connection.
A two-connection limit is likely sufficient for most individuals, but five or more connections offer flexibility for couples, families, or people with many devices. The minimum: email support, with responses sent within 24 business hours; robust help section.
The best: email, chat support during business hours, quick response to weekend tickets. An extensive help section on the website can resolve many problems. Although we consider online-chat support to be the gold standard, quick and clear responses to emails can be equally helpful.
After going through the above criteria in , we narrowed our initial list down to just four services that met our requirements: IVPN , Mullvad , Surfshark , and TunnelBear. We signed up for each one of those services and dug deeper into their policies, technology, and performance on a custom-built gaming PC, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and a Pixel phone.
Multi-threaded testing, according to a white paper by OTI , has a higher tolerance for background packet losses and can obfuscate deficiencies in the network, so it tends to be more forgiving than other tests. From Portland, Oregon, we ran the VPN-enabled test using eight different server locations per service:. For services that offered automatic location selection—a feature designed to give you the best speed possible—we also ran the tests on whichever location the VPN software chose.
We ran the full series of tests with each location during three time periods that we chose to see whether internet rush hours drastically reduced performance:. Additionally, we tested the apps over video calls to see if any service caused frozen screens, slowdowns, or dropped connections. We also evaluated the interface and experience of the desktop and mobile apps of all the top-performing services. We looked at the payment process, how easy each app was to set up and connect, and what options were available in the settings pane.
We contacted each of our finalists with simple questions about their service and troubleshooting. VPN companies provide technical support through email, online ticketing systems, or live chat, but some chat options are not available outside of business hours. Our response times to support inquiries ranged from immediate chat responses to two days.
We reached out to these finalists for more information about their operations to judge their trustworthiness and transparency, and we spoke to two by phone and one over email. Mullvad is a secure VPN that provided a seamless experience during our testing: It was easy to set up, and it hummed along so quietly in the background that we would often forget that it was even turned on. The company excelled in signals of transparency and trust, and in our testing the service was easy to use and delivered some of the fastest speeds of any VPN we tried.
Dedicated apps for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS make Mullvad simple to set up on a variety of devices even if you have little technical knowledge. Mullvad has also been the most consistent in conducting audits regularly, about once a year. In November and December , Mullvad underwent its latest security audit , a process that is key for improving trust in an opaque industry. Conducted by cybersecurity consulting firm Cure53, the most recent infrastructure audit took five testers a total of 22 person-days to complete.
In evaluating Mullvad, the auditors spotted 12 vulnerabilities, implementation issues, and other findings: two of high severity, two of medium severity, four of low severity, and four informational. Neither audit found any issues of critical severity, and both companies addressed the security issues quickly. Many VPN services put their marketing promises front and center while keeping the specifics of those promises out of sight in a cryptic privacy policy, if they mention them at all.
Mullvad keeps its policies comprehensive and transparent, and those policies generally indicate that it minimizes the data it collects at every step. The privacy policy states that the company does not collect or store activity logs of any kind. Both Mullvad and IVPN may not even collect an email address during sign-up, depending on how you choose to pay. Mullvad typically stores only the account number and the time remaining on an account, plus a few other configuration details.
The stored data includes whether customers are making payments via PayPal, Stripe, Swish , or bank wire, or if they send an email or report a problem additional information for other types of payments is described in various policy pages on the site. Mullvad stores transaction IDs and email addresses for PayPal transactions but deletes them after six months. Mullvad also collects very little data on its website visitors, and all of the cookies that may track you on the Mullvad website expire when you close the browser window.
In contrast, IVPN uses a self-hosted web-analytics service called Matomo and collects data on your browser user-agent, language, screen resolution, referring website, and IP address, though it does discard the last piece of the IP address. Research from The Markup shows that other VPNs have far more advertising and other third-party trackers on their sites.
Mullvad has fairly readable terms of service, including details about what kinds of information the company collects and how it uses that information. As we discuss in the section on trusting a VPN , using a VPN service beholden to US laws provides for some level of consumer protection, but some people argue that services outside the US—like Mullvad in Sweden—are less likely to be swept up in US-government data-collection efforts.
Free trials are rare in this category, but we like that Mullvad offers a day money-back guarantee so you can see if the server speeds and connections work for you. For a trusted VPN to be worthwhile, its network has to be useful, which generally means offering fast connection speeds and a wide variety of locations to connect through.
During non-rush-hour traffic, Mullvad averaged We recommend using WireGuard for better security and faster speed. We like that Mullvad lays out its security standards clearly ; although IVPN meets our standards, that company is less technical in its descriptions. Mullvad includes a kill switch, which stops all traffic if the VPN disconnects.
As with other competitors we tested, this feature worked as promised and kept our browsing and connections offline until the VPN connection was confirmed. This flexibility makes Mullvad simple to set up on a variety of devices even if you have little technical knowledge. You can customize whether to launch the app on startup and to autoconnect when it launches. It also has a local-network sharing setting to access other devices on the same network, which prevents problems with printing and file sharing, a common issue for some VPNs.
For instance, you can download Mullvad apps using the Tor Browser and verify the signatures for new app releases as well as install them on Android from the open-source Google Play store alternative, F-Droid. We prefer free trials because they make the process of verifying speeds before subscribing to a service so much easier.
Although Mullvad does not have a bug-bounty program, it does have a dedicated email address and PGP key for security researchers to report vulnerabilities, and it says it has rewarded findings in the past. When we checked its customer service in , the company responded quickly, although not as quickly as some of its competitors, to a support email during the weekend and provided clear and informative responses.
Its team operates support during weekday office hours on Central European time. Mullvad provides clear setup and anonymity guides , too. If you want to get faster responses to support tickets, more easily install a VPN on network-attached storage, or pay for your subscription with Monero, IVPN is a good choice. Like Mullvad, its website includes detailed information on its policies and a readable terms-of-service page.
As with Mullvad, we found that the company behind IVPN Privatus Limited stands out from the competition on signs of trust and transparency. The company, incorporated in Gibraltar, lists its core team on its website, and founder and CEO Nick Pestell answered all of our questions about its operations. IVPN has 11 full-time staffers, one of whom works specifically on infrastructure security and reliability.
It seems committed to transparency, and it has undergone a public, third-party security audit of its infrastructure; the auditors also confirmed that IVPN fixed the issues found during the audit. IVPN also posts a transparency report that shows the number of valid legal requests it received from government or law enforcement agencies in a given year, going back to VPN advertisements are ripe with overstatements, so we like that IVPN makes a point to say that it does not advertise or guarantee complete anonymity, enable geoblocked content on streaming services, or offer a way around the Great Firewall of China.
Additionally, IVPN has published ethical guidelines on its site, including clear, detailed information on its marketing methods and ethical commitments. We like that IVPN lets you choose the city of the server you want to log in to, or it can automatically select the fastest connection, an option that Mullvad does not offer.
Mullvad and IVPN are also pretty similar once configured. IVPN offers a kill switch in the form of an always-on firewall option, which worked when we tested it. Whereas Mullvad has a hard limit of five devices per subscriber, IVPN provides two subscription tiers: a Standard account, which works for up to two devices simultaneously, or a more expensive Pro account, which works with as many as seven. Both plans offer the ability to subscribe for a week, a month, or one, two, or three years, with an increasingly discounted rate when you start committing to years—a pricing feature not available with Mullvad, which charges a fixed monthly price.
If you go with IVPN, we recommend choosing an account type by the number of devices you plan to install it on. You can also install IVPN on some routers and network-attached storage devices. IVPN may be a better choice for anyone who is less comfortable with doing their own technical troubleshooting. Its support was more responsive and helpful than some we tried, as IVPN representatives responded quickly to our support ticket during the weekend, providing clear and informative answers.
You can also get help via chat during business hours. The company has two customer service staffers providing around 18 hours of coverage per day both through ticket requests and via chat though the chat may be offline if a staff member is working on a ticket.
But most people should block trackers through free extensions like Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin, anyway. Sites that deal with banking or shopping have been using these types of secure connections for a long time to protect financial data, and in the past few years many major news and information sites, including that of The New York Times , have implemented it, as well. Every popular browser now supports an HTTPS-preferred mode, though some require that you enable the setting manually.
HTTPS is a powerful feature because it helps keep sensitive browsing private at no extra cost to the people using it. But like most security standards, it has some potential problems. Tor is a free service that attempts to preserve anonymity—something that VPNs do not do. It is a distributed network that runs traffic through multiple relays.
Tor does not write any history to disk, allowing you to do internet research without leaving a trail back to you or leaving a forensic trace on your computer. Although it cannot protect you from, say, targeted government surveillance, Tor can be useful for looking up private information, such as medical conditions, without your activity being traced back to you or added to a marketing profile.
Tor uses a different circuit from a different IP address in each tab, making it more difficult for other parties to link your searches and accounts across tabs. However, Tor can be blocked by some websites and has a reputation for slow connections. By encrypting all the traffic from your home or mobile device to a server you manage, you deprive your ISP and a potentially villainous VPN of all your juicy traffic logs.
But most people lack the skills, patience, or energy—or some combination of the three—to do this. Lastly, although you remove one threat from the equation by cutting out a VPN service provider, you also lose the extra layer of privacy that comes from your traffic mixing in with that of hundreds or thousands of other customers. Surfshark had previously kept details of its leadership private but made them public in The company also conducted a white-box infrastructure audit.
We had a great experience with TunnelBear in the past, which prompted us to name it as our top pick previously. It continually excels in trust, transparency, and usability. In addition to publishing the results of multiple recent security audits, the company posts regular transparency reports and has a clear, easy-to-understand privacy policy. It was slow both during and outside of internet rush hour, and we experienced some lag on video calls while running the VPN.
The acquisition brought in Encrypt. This latest series of audits did not include its infrastructure. ExpressVPN has released a mix of audits for the build verification process it used when compiling its apps, but not for the apps themselves or its server infrastructure—a baseline requirement for our evaluation.
Its new ownership and staffing additionally raised other trust concerns in our minds, making its omission of a complete infrastructure audit even more of a problem. Similarly, NordVPN has recently undergone a series of third-party audits for its apps by cybersecurity consulting firm VerSprite, but this series did not include an audit of its infrastructure.
Zone, VPN. AC, VPN. We ruled out some VPNs for trust issues. EarthVPN appears to have lied about its logging practices , while ProxySH confessed to spying on customer traffic in HideMyAss has handed customer information over to police.
None of these VPNs appear to have had third-party security audits, either. Yes, most VPNs allow you to pick a location for your IP address, which can get around some geo-restricted websites and online censorship. This depends on what internet speed you're paying for, your location, and the location of the VPN server. But even in the best-case scenario, a VPN will typically slow down your connection a little.
This is why we recommend starting with a trial period, if one is available, to test the speeds before making a commitment. A VPN used in conjunction with some browser extensions can reduce the type of invasive tracking used primarily for advertising, but if you need anonymity, you should use tools like Tor. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin tend to be perceived as anonymous, but ultimately they create a digital paper trail that could be linked back to you.
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If you are using Bitcoin Core and derivative software, then you may have noticed that there is now a warning that states: Quote Warning: Unknown block versions being mined! It's possible unknown rules are in effect This warning will appear at the top of the Bitcoin Core GUI and reported in the errors or warnings field of the getinfo, getnetworkinfo, and getmininginfo RPC commands.
Currently this warning is benign as there is no fork and no new network rules have activated. Your coins are not at risk. Warning: Unknown block versions being mined! It's possible unknown rules are in effect. You signed out in another tab or window. Lines beginning with are comments. Note that if you use testnet, signet or regtest, particularly with the options. Bind to given address and always listen on it. Use [host]:port notation for IPv6.
Bind to given address and add permission flags to peers connecting to it. Quick Primer on addnode vs connect. In addition it will tell. So if you're behind a firewall, or have other problems. If you want to stay private, use 'connect' to only.
If you run multiple nodes on a LAN, there's no need for. Thanks goes to [Noodle] on Freenode. Listening mode, enabled by default except when 'connect' is being used. Port on which to listen for connections default: , testnet: , signet: , regtest: This option.
These limits do not apply to connections added manually with the -addnode. Maximum upload bandwidth target in MiB per day e. This limits the upload bandwidth for those with bandwidth limits. Refer to the manpage or bitcoind -help for further details. If no rpcpassword is set, rpc cookie auth is sought. This option is typically used.
It is set at initialization time. String to be appended to bitcoin. You can even add multiple entries of these to the server conf file, and client can use any of them:. By default, only RPC connections from localhost are allowed.