TunnelBear - 5 stars, because "it's just so much fun to use."
I hate being a cynical ass (I really do) but this guy has no business at all running this website.
I'll not preach the long form of my usual VPN rant (briefly: they introduce another man-in-the-middle - who is probably anonymous to you, one who is very likely not subject to and utterly unaware of data protection laws, which makes you less safe rather than more).
People will read this site, think he knows what he's talking about, and get themselves into a lot of bother because of the bad advice this dude is giving out. He really needs to read up on what he's advocating here, as he clearly has no knowledge of the critical security factors behind these services.
You might think to yourself:
"Easy on, maybe he's writing for folks that don't care about security and just want US Netflix unblocked in their country."
And you would be right if not for the bottom of the page saying this:
"If you've found this site useful, please share it with a friend who you think would benefit from safer, private browsing."
So yeah, actively encouraging the spread of this terrible security advice is probably worth calling out.
The following VPNs were not reviewed due to their website experience being poorly designed. This can mean heavy use of stock photos, utter disregard for detail, difficult navigation, excessive and hard to follow text, non-defaulting to HTTPS, and overall poor usability.
At least he understands what's important in a VPN. Kudos for excluding services that use stock photos in their website design.
of course there is no causal relation between website quality and VPN quality. but there is definitely a statistical relationship. setting up a secure and fast VPN is very complex and it's hard to see why somebody would then neglect the entry point to that service. actually I'd assume that this negligence would be likely when the VPN is actually only supposed to serve as a malicious MIM. hence I accept this as a valid heuristic.
There are so many bad websites for good projects. Case in point: OpenBSD and OpenSSH websites looks like ugly colored plain HTML from the 90s but they are still killer projects.
You may be right but I think his own website is poorly designed too: he says that "Private Internet Access" is too long because forced him to modify his CSS, and as a "forum" (link at the bottom of the page) he uses GitHub's issue tracker.
> The one thing I didn't like was that P2P/torrenting is blocked. They claim that to enable torrenting, they would have had to enable logging.
Wait, if Tunnelbear are throttling P2P connections, where is the red flag?
Regarding NordVPN: I’ve used them a few years ago and their service was terrible. Disconnects upon disconnects, servers not working for days — I gave up eventually.
Never tested any other VPN he reviewed, however, I’ve written a guide[1] how to pick a VPN provider without throwing numbers and reviews around me, if anyone wants to give it a read.
I hate being a cynical ass (I really do) but this guy has no business at all running this website.
I'll not preach the long form of my usual VPN rant (briefly: they introduce another man-in-the-middle - who is probably anonymous to you, one who is very likely not subject to and utterly unaware of data protection laws, which makes you less safe rather than more).
People will read this site, think he knows what he's talking about, and get themselves into a lot of bother because of the bad advice this dude is giving out. He really needs to read up on what he's advocating here, as he clearly has no knowledge of the critical security factors behind these services.
You might think to yourself:
"Easy on, maybe he's writing for folks that don't care about security and just want US Netflix unblocked in their country."
And you would be right if not for the bottom of the page saying this:
"If you've found this site useful, please share it with a friend who you think would benefit from safer, private browsing."
So yeah, actively encouraging the spread of this terrible security advice is probably worth calling out.