Is ProtonVPN worth it?
Got reminded of this while reading about ProtonMail. The reason I haven’t gotten into proper #piracy is that I don’t have a VPN for torrenting, and the reason I don’t have a VPN is that I don’t #torrent. So it would be nice if I got a good VPN while #degoogling myself.
Will ProtonVPN rat me out to Comcast? I know some VPNs don’t hide what you’re downloading from your ISP, for reasons I don’t fully understand.
If you are using Linux don’t use the GUI app. It will lock up and leak past a killswitch.
The CLI app works ok. It annoyingly has issues reconnecting on reboot without disabling and renabling the killswitch. Sometimes it works, other times not.
You don’t have to use any software from Proton VPN, they will allow you to download openvpn and wireguard config files so you can set up your own client. Takes some more effort to do it right, yes, but its a good option if you’re up for it.
Just make sure to either set the Wireguard profile’s IPv6 to Link-Local or disable IPv6 on your network connection, otherwise you’ll leak data and DNS entries over it. The reason is because Proton’s wireguard implementation does not support ipv6 yet.
What i found to work the best is to generate and download a config file, then import it into NetworkManager. There’s a plugin for wireguard here: https://github.com/max-moser/network-manager-wireguard
This way, it’s easy to add routes, autostart, etc. But I don’t think a safe killswitch is possible.
Edit: But since this is a piracy community, i should mention that qbittorrent has a setting for specifying the network interface, so it’s easy to force it to use the vpn connection only, in place of a killswitch.
As far as I know, proton doesn’t allow port forwarding, so makes using it for torrenting suboptimal. If you want to use torrents with a VPN, there’s better options
PF works with proton, I use it. But you have to continuously call it to stay open. (On linux)
It does allow port forwarding. The Windows app supports it. On Linux, you can do it via a one-liner script: https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding-manual-setup/
