Free VPN apps on Google Play turned Android phones into proxies

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.

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.
- 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]).
- 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!
@viking@infosec.pub @Mikufan@ani.social
In China there are lot of home brewed solutions like openclash, passwall, vmess...etc. Traditional commercial VPNs are too expensive or suck in China.
- 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.
  
  It's opensource, You can get a vps and run your own, very easy and the speed is enough to watch 4k youtube.
  
  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.
  
  @viking@infosec.pub
  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.
  
  Interesting, thanks! My astrill subscription is still running for a couple months, but will test it as a fallback.
- LOL, China is not that bad, and the GFW is easy to break through anyway.
  
  Have you ever been to China? I have been lived in China for many years, actually no much complains of my very own experience so far.
  And I'd been to US, Indonesia, Thailand...and the worst experience I had is in US, each time I visited there, there were gunshot incidents happened nearby, and homeless people, bad smell on subway...I am not saying all US places are like this, I only visited CA, some places are cool, but I definitely won't go out alone after 8pm in the dark.
  
  1989
  
  @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip
  Thanksgiving
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.

You dont know that much about VPNs then

- Ah your list has already doubled

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

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

I still use Nord. Never had any problems with it.

- So, did you read the article? A rented server was breached because it didn't belong to Nord and the company that it belonged to was at fault. I personally have had no problems with the service. They didn't lose passwords, user data or any credit card information. At worst someone may have been able to monitor some user data and internet traffic. This also happened before I started using them (I had another VPN before that).
  
  How is it exactly that you think large VPN's work? Because I gotta say, no large VPN isn't using some independent vendor. Can you prove they still do business with that vender?
I'm not well versed in the machinations of the Chinese government, but if a relatively "normie" VPN like Nord works in China... it's probably controlled opposition (i.e. they're logging everything to a government server.)
- You also don't appear to be well versed in VPNs.