I switched to windscribe last month because the proton CEO starting spewing politcal BS, and I wanted port forwarding that wasn’t locked behind a shitty GUI.
As far as I was concerned setup was super easy, the VPN speeds were great, and port forwarding worked really nicely. The whole price for a fixed server and port forward, + unlimited data was a bit much (at $95/year) but for the ease of use and speeds I was getting, I was happy to stick with them.
My setup is a always-on server with a 1gbps connection, where yes, I fucking seed my shit, all of it. I have about 30TB of linux ISOs and counting, and it’s rare that my combined upload speed is less than 1MBps, ever.
Which lead me to getting banned from windscribe with no notice or warning in the middle of last week. This lead to me having to spend tracker points to avoid HnR, and i’m also unable to grab any new ISOs until I find a new VPN provider that won’t ban me for actually using the service full time.
I did shoot them an email (after talking’ with their AI bot first), and they were actually helpful enough. The offered to restore support, so long as I promised to not torrent with them again (which, I honestly did promise not to. I’m not sticking with a VPN service that can’t handle me actually using it for what it’s advertised for) and they did unban the account. Whole email chain took about three days to get resolved.
My sticking point is that they still have instructions on setting up torrents on their own website, and that they specifically allow for unlimited data (with the plan i paid for) so long as it’s just one user. I did not break those rules. After clarifying that in the support email, they still said that I was using too much data (despite the unlimited data advertisement) and that torrenting was not allowed on their service.
TL:DR: Windscribe bans you if you use a lot of data, and support says torrents aren’t allowed, despite their website advertising such. Proof in the attached images.
If y’all have any other suggestions for a VPN that allow port forwarding i’d really appreciate it.
I think you should give surfshark a go I’ve been using it for over a year every day all day and it’s flawless.
Their own website says they allow p2p so I would see what your options are for getting a refund. If you purchased with a credit card, file a chargeback and include the documentation.
proton CEO starting spewing politcal BS
Context, please?
What started it I think is this twitter post praising trump and the republican party: https://xcancel.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660
He later doubled down on it (if I recall correctly) and the company has generally been making some highly questionable decisions since
It’s definitely a bandwidth usage thing, given their reputation for being informal in communications they could have been a lot nicer about that.
It’s really disappointing to see this from them, they were one the best priced VPNs out there claiming to respect privacy. Their support was also super helpful with my questions about their datacenter static IPs.
Tailscale + mullvad integration works great if you want port forwarding and at about the same price as mullvad VPN.
How does this work??? I thought I wouldn’t be able to use Mullvad with port forwarding. Would I need to have a vps? Would the VPS not disallow me for connecting to VPN or detecting p2p traffic?
Since y’all probably know more about VPNs than me, is Mullvad any good? I bought them to use for torrents, though haven’t tried seeding anything yet. I assume they’re good with that?
Also, anyone know if they’re run by MAGA creeps?
Mullvad are Swedish and the most privacy respecting out there, so that’s an excellent choice.
They are who I use, never heard of anything fishy with them.
The fact that you can pay by mailing in cash is pretty cool.
You can’t forward ports on mullvad. You know if that matters to you. Airvpn and proton allow port forwarding.
We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.
We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.
Oh no please don’t boycott! The current boycotts are actually costing companies money and we can’t have people learning that boycotts can actually work!
Username checks out
We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.
LOL
LMAO, even.
Boycotts are useful alongside militancy. The Montgomery bus boycott for example, was powerful because it gave an alternate path to resolve disputes that were playing out through marches and demonstrations that faced violent opposition.
Boycotts do not generally succeed at their aims if they are not accompanied by that militant wing.
I don’t know of any actions taken by proton that align with the ceos positions you oppose, for example: selective logging and reporting targeted at people in opposition to the trump government. I don’t know of any militant opposition or public demonstrations against those actions even if they did exist.
So I don’t think a boycott of proton would be effective at its goals even if they were explicit and achievable.
More broadly speaking, political action needs to be weighed against the negative repercussions it can bring; which is why in America, for example, lots of political demonstration tends to be younger people with less to lose.
When weighing that decision against having access to a privacy focused (if you don’t give them any identifying information) service, it may make more sense to abandon the boycott in order to get the service.
You could also just use airvpn, but it’s a little spartan and has a different feature set.
Anyway that was the whole point, that it’s easy to jump into an ineffective type of boycott that really hurts you by exposing you to prosecution and also doesn’t actually accomplish your political goals.
Lol I’m not reading all that.
Proton’s CEO is a fan of the MAGA hate cult, so they can fuck off. I’ll use another VPN and not lose sleep over it.
Air has worked really well for me. It’s not as straightforward to set up as some others, but it’s had better uptime than my server.
PIA also has port forwarding. I have been using it with great success for several years. Don’t know anything about their politics.
What’s concerning to me is, how do they know what you use their services for if supposedly they don’t keep any logs. https://windscribe.com/privacy/ https://windscribe.com/features/no-identifying-logs/
It was submitted in the chat…
There is a big difference between “not keeping logs” and “dont have a way to check what you are doing right now”.
No logs just means they can’t check what you did last week but they can always check the traffic you are producing in that moment. If they see traffic from a torrent protocol they know you are torrenting.
Edit: they do claim they do “No Monitoring” so yeah by their own words they should not be able to tell you are torrenting.
No Monitoring
We don’t monitor your activity and have no way of seeing what sites you are visiting. We do store when you last used Windscribe as well as the total amount of data used in a 30 day period (to enforce free account limitations and to prevent abuse).
It doesn’t take a genius to guess a forwarded port is used for torrenting though
Like most any paid VPN service they need to track bandwidth usage somewhat. They can’t see what you’re accessing but they can see how much of whatever it is. Windscribe also offers a free 10gb/mo plan so they do track it for that purpose as well, much like any VPN with a free tier would.
Sure, they say that they monitor bandwidth usage but how do they know it was used for torrenting.
Because I told them I used torrents. Their FAQ literally has a page with instructions for setting up torrents. Still does. I didn’t think it’d be an issue for them.
You told them after getting banned so either they saw you were torrenting or gave you a bs explanation and banned you just for your data usage.
Probably the latter. Doesn’t matter which it is though; they advertise both on their website.
It’s probably pretty obvious when terabytes of upload are accrued over a few days like what OP mentioned, by seeding 24/7.
Ha!
My ISP sends me emails saying (paraphrased) “we’re only forwarding this email because we have to. We don’t track your data and your IP logs are wiped every 30 days. Your best option is not to respond because then they would know who you are.”
What ISP are you with?
The CEO of Windscribe is an Elon stan so you didn’t switch to a more left-leaning provider than Proton.
I suspect most CEOs are, The vast majority just have enough common sense not to ruin their relations with the 99 percenters.
Holy shit, you’re not lying. The literal first Post on his Twitter
“It’s not allowed… especially in the amounts you do it” LMAO. It’s against the rules but we let him murder some people, just so long as it doesn’t get out of hand 🤪
Perhaps murder is a bit extreme. It’s more like “we’ve noticed you’re taking woodchips from the playground. That’s not allowed. We wouldn’t mind if you were just taking a few chips, but you’ve taken 2 tons.”
[edit] But putting analogies aside, the service really should make rules and restrictions like this clear in advance. That seems like the real failing here, rather than the rule itself.
If the service is advertised as no data limit, aka “take as man woodchips as you like” they shouldn’t track back on it.
Sure. I agree that’s the problem; and none of these analogies really help make that any easier to understanding. Certainly they don’t have a “murder as much as you like” policy! (I find that analogies are rarely useful - except for manipulating how you want people to feel.)
More like they operate a tollroad to the playground and are concerned about why there’s so many trucks of wood chips costing them much more to maintain the road to the playground. And OP freely admitted they’re taking truckloads of woodchips from the playground.
Except the analogy also doesn’t work because ultimately piracy isn’t taking, it’s just copying and sharing copies. There isn’t really a good analogy without directly describing digital distribution and piracy. Maybe an analogy involving a solar farm and a transmission company? Except that gets into technical details that are just as technical as just explaining it as it is
The analogy works fine, the problem here isn’t about pirating, it’s about bandwidth
I’ll let you in on some reality about sysadmins: we generally don’t care what you’re doing until it causes problems. Clearly this guy’s amount of traffic did.
So yeah, absolutely. This is normal and reasonable.
It has to be against the rules for situations exactly like this where OP should be using a seedbox. But generally, they have better things to do than track down every little minor rule abuse.
Like playing their own pirated games while wfh. Or fixing other problems. Most teams of people who support shit like this are understaffed.
For instance, I’m sure that people are using my work network for all sorts of shit. I’ve seen people streaming Netflix to their desks. We lock down what we can, and don’t worry about shit until we have to because it’s causing a problem. Like years ago when someone streamed Netflix at an old location with I think only a T1 connection, saturated the network connection, and then no one could access anything on the network.
Most people don’t go around looking for reasons to enforce the rules. They use them when they have to because there’s a problem.
We don’t even care about customers going way over their license until they give us a reason to. You pay for 500 users, you have 2000 and are using the platform as a barely compressed 4k video hosting service which it really isn’t designed for. Then you also complain about performance?
Homestly if they didn’t act so shitty when raising a support ticket over it we probably would have continued to not care about it. Being a dick about it though and we will look for any reason to tell you to fuck off.
if somebody does a little torrenting you can just hand wave it, but if someone is doing all of the torrenting, you pretty clearly know about it.
Well obviously. A severe violation of anything is considered worse by pretty much anyone.
I thought this was your Internet service provider. This is a VPN service? Holy shit what’s the point of a VPN with rules like this. Fuck em. I use proton and am looking to switch because the CEO is a right-winger but they don’t pull this shit.
Holy shit what’s the point of a VPN with rules like this.
Maybe I just want to pay $8 per month to change my Netflix (which I also pay $20 per month for) in order to watch different shows from another country. 👉👈
Does that even work? These companies know the IP ranges of many VPNs and block them.
I have no idea. I know back before I had sponsor block that seemed to be a common VPN influencer talking point.
I’ve seen a grand total of one influencer make a good argument for a VPN and that was Alan Fisher saying “have you observed your work skirting regulations that they shouldn’t be? Are you potentially reviewing legal materials on your work’s WiFi that your place of work might prefer you didn’t know about? To help avoid retaliation, you might need a VPN such as one from today’s sponsor…”
If your workplace lets you run a VPN on their device/network they’re probably not looking through your traffic
Blocking VPNs isn’t really possible. You can block known IP ranges but ultimately there’s so many ways to encapsulate and encrypt traffic that no solution is 100%. I have specifically worked at places in which those in management positions are interested in sniffing DNS queries to “see what people are up to on company time” and those happened to also be the employers that were doing sketchy things that may or may not have been legal
You could pay less for that stranger but understandable
I don’t pay for a VPN or Netflix lol
It was a comedic strawman
AirVPN (Eddie) has port forwarding. The interface isn’t very appealing and their website is meh, but it works and I got a great deal on a 3 year subscription.
I use airvpn with an always on server setup, port forwarding, and constant seeding. If you’re okay with manually using a wireguard or openvpn client instead of an airvpn specific client it works great.
Edit Plus, they have a progressive pricing thing that lets you buy a few days for like 2€ just to test stuff.
AirVPN is perfect. Works flawlessy with gluetun, only thing the website is kinda outdated, but I can’t remember the last time I got on there so who cares
AirVPN!!! Its really great.
Meh, switch to usenet. Download as much as you want, at max bandwidth 100% of the time, with 0 need for a vpn and no obligation to re-seed content for months on end.
Do you have a guide or something to get started? I’ve considered doing this a couple of times, but haven’t had the bandwidth to dig in and figure it out.
In short, you need three things: (here’s what I’ve been using)
An indexer: NZBgeek Just like a torrent indexer, but for .nzb files instead of .torrents
A provider: Frugal Usenet Where you’re downloading data from.
And a client: SabNZBD
When it comes to which provider to choose; pretty much all of them provide similar retention and unlimited data cap, so you really just need to look for something nearby. Often people will recommend having 2 providers one covered by DMCA and one covered by NTD to make content more available; but I’ve not really noticed a need.
Why would having a provider covered by the DMCA be a good thing (not offhand aware of NTD but I am guessing it is similar to the DMCA)? I have also been interested in trying Usenet, so thanks for sharing three examples of what to look for!
NTD is the European version of DMCA essentially.
It’s not a good thing; but usenet providers like any other internet service are generally subject to one or the other depending on their location, so it’s good to know which one covers the provider you use.
With providers spread across the globe, mirroring each others data, and subject to different copyright notice/takedown laws; the whole system is quite robust against removals. While you can send notices to individual providers, It’s extremely difficult to coordinate a global takedown effort and truly remove content from usenet as a whole.
That’s why multiple provider’s in different regions can be beneficial. Some people will buy ‘block’ accounts (a fixed amount of data to be used as needed, vs a monthly cap) for a provider in a separate region to fallback on when the data has been taken down from their local provider.
What does retention mean in this context? File retention? Is there any way to integrate with Kodi or other media server like debrid services?
Retention refers to how long a particular provider keeps the data users upload. 3-5k days is pretty typical, but there are some lower ones. Data is also mirrored across the backbones of all the different providers; so if it’s removed from one (due to retention or a takedown notice) it’s still available on others.
I’ve had little to no issue finding content, with 97% of data I’ve requested being available (stats from SabNZBD); but in the off chance you want something that is unavailable, most indexers have a requests section.
Similar to setting up torrenting, usenet indexers/clients can be added to the arr stacks for automation. I’m not sure about Kodi/Real Debrid as I don’t use those.
I don’t have a guide, but I knew nothing about it and it took me like 15-30 minutes total of googling and researching to set it all up.
Good on you! Usenet has been around for DECADES.
I don’t have a guide that’s modern. I’m just remembering how I used to connect in the 90s-2000s.
A search of the comments didn’t turn up any mention of seedboxes. So I’ll throw that hat in the ring as an option.
Seems like something that could fit here
