For those in China who need a VPN

[kennethhall250]

Opera is a free resource, I will not recommend you to use free stuff for online security purpose. You should go with paid VPNs such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN or Surfshark. In these VPNs, Surfshark would be better for you as its pricing plans because it offers a whopping 85% discount on its 24 months plan. You will have to pay only $1.99 per month. For more details of this VPN, read here.

[E Irizarry R&B Singer]

NordVPN is the way. I sometimes use AirVPN based out of Italy as well

[CannedHam]

I am in China now and using ExpressVPN. It's been incredibly hit or miss recently.

[E Irizarry R&B Singer]

I am in China now and using ExpressVPN. It's been incredibly hit or miss recently.

NordVPN to HK and Taiwanese servers worked for me on a Shanghai layover.
NordVPN on Linux and Android OS's are best IMHO.

[CannedHam]

I am in China now and using ExpressVPN. It's been incredibly hit or miss recently.

NordVPN to HK and Taiwanese servers worked for me on a Shanghai layover.
NordVPN on Linux and Android OS's are best IMHO.

When was this? I just recently read on another China forum that NordVPN has been unusable for the last month or so (since the 70th anniversary of the PRC). ExpressVPN on my laptop has been super flaky and pretty much unusable on my android phone. It's beyond irritating.

As an emergency fallback I can use my unlimited 2G (yuck) data on my cell for things like checking GMail, using Google, etc.

[zubairkhanzhk]

Opera is a free resource, I will not recommend you to use free stuff for online security purpose. You should go with paid VPNs such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN or Surfshark. In these VPNs, Surfshark would be better for you as its pricing plans because it offers a whopping 85% discount on its 24 months plan. You will have to pay only $1.99 per month. For more details of this VPN, read here.

Yes, you are right SurfVPN is perfect VPN with reasonable price; although it is a new VPN in the market they it is offering some outstanding features. However, I am using surfshark for the last 7 months, and it is working excellent.

[ulrichneilson]

PureVPN works well for me. VPNs usually work better on a computer than a phone. I was also able to connect from my computer to my wifi device which is a wireless router. It works very well although I have to put it together and I think an antivirus program is affected.

[Winston]

Is this true that VPNs are a scam? See below.



Description:

Commercial VPNs probably hurt your privacy and security more than they help. Behind the layers of marketing sits a darker side of the industry. Ask yourself questions like:

- Why trust a VPN company and their ISP over my own?
- Who’s actually running these companies?
- Why so many VPN ads on YouTube?
- What’s up with all the review sites?

VPNs are designed to transport devices from a network of low trust to high trust. Or bridge traffic between high and high trust. A site-to-site or corporate VPN both fall in this category.

With commercial VPNs, you’re more likely to be transporting your Internet to a network of lower or uncertain trust. Rather than just your ISP seeing your traffic, you grant this privilege to the VPN provider and their ISP too.

Most of the providers out there are owned by just a few parent companies. Many of them have hidden ownership and conflicting motivations. Many “no-logging” VPN companies have turned out to be doing the opposite.

You shouldn’t use a VPN if:
- You want to encrypt your traffic.

Most of your traffic is already encrypted because most common sites support HTTPS. Encrypting your DNS queries is becoming standard too in web browsers.

- You want to hide your identity.

There’s all kinds of other metadata in your network packets available to track you. Advanced actors can correlate them to track and discover your location.

There are some cases where using a VPN does make sense though.

- You want to mask your IP address.
- Circumventing IP blocks to watch Netflix
- Getting around national firewalls
- Bypassing download limits
- Performing offensive security assessments
- Conducting OSINT and research

If you do need a VPN, the best option is to do-it-yourself. Tunnel back to a home server. Set up a cloud server. Open-source software like Wireguard, Shadowsocks, and SSH makes this easy.

Not to mention the hundreds of guides out there to follow.